TV Ratings: Seven's SAS Australia captures a win, but will it hold the position?

Seven’s SAS Australia captures a win, but will it hold the position?

Seven's military experiment SAS Australia has given the channel a modest win. Can it keep the lead?

Oct 20, 2020

Seven last night debuted SAS Australia to a 1.19 million audience, making it a modestly successful launch. But tonight’s second ep is the first big test, along with next Monday night. The question to be answered: how many of last night’s audience will return? If the audience on both nights is within 5% of last night’s then it looks like it’s working. Anything above that will mean a success and Nine will go searching for Navy SEALS for a knock off.

So Seven won total people and Nine won the main channels, both narrowly. Ten was third and the ABC fourth. Ten’s Have You Been Paying Attention perked up from a recent slumber and made the top 10 with 962,000 nationally. That was after Junior MasterChef averaged a weak 606,000. Nine’s The Block averaged 1.05 million. It was one of those nights when everyone got what they wanted and could go to bed without Netflixing.

The rugby Dally M Medal on Foxtel bored for a tiny sliver of Australia — 69,000 watched the long broadcast (most of them loyal News Corp and Foxtel employees). The results were incorrectly dropped ahead of time onto the Daily Telegraph website in another embarrassment for the awards (last year there was some dodgy betting on the Coach of the Year award). Foxtel and the Tele are both controlled by News Corp, so an in-house Murdoch empire stuff up. If Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews had been anywhere near the stuff up, it would have been a national scandal and Peta Credlin would dragged out the pitchfork and torch and been demanding answers to impossible questions, again.

In regional markets Seven News, 549,000; Seven News 6.30, 534,000; Home and Away, 381,000; SAS Australia, 361,000; 7pm ABC News, 331,000.

Network channel share: